Raspberry Pi 3 and Windows 10 IoT Core For Digital Signage

I’ve been a fan of the Raspberry Pi since its first release and have used them for various small-scale server tasks throughout the years in personal projects in my lab. When Windows 10 IoT Core was announced, I was excited to finally have an inexpensive embedded Windows test bed. I ended up buying a Raspberry Pi 3b, the 7″ touch screen and a case to contain it all.

Microsoft provided many samples, including one that is a simple digital signage test app. Testing with this and the Now Micro IoT Player app made me do a little digging after discovering poor video performance. It turns out the Raspberry Pi doesn’t have hardware accelerated video playback under Windows 10 IoT Core. This really limits the kind of video/interactive apps you can use on the device with this OS. One of my original commercialization ideas was porting our Now Micro Player software stack to the compute module to take advantage of what I had seen released from NEC Display Solutions.

To sum up and help you make a decision if this is a good mix for your use case:

Pros

Inexpensive

Wide range of hardware interface capabilities

Information and sample projects everywhere

Cons

Lack of commercial support

Non-hardware accelerated video under Windows 10 IoT Core

Things I would be comfortable using this for:

Static or low-frame rate signage

Non-core or not mission critical signage for small scale implementations